With the proliferation of social media networks and individual user's propensity to endorse, share, or otherwise express opinions regarding social media content, there is an ever-growing volume of valuable data that can be used to analyze or otherwise derive the general significance, influence, and impact surrounding such content. Moreover, individual user's interactions with social media content can provide insights relevant to the entities that author or place the content (either directly or through subsidiaries/contractors/employees/etc.).
The advertising industry is over a trillion dollar per year industry with an ever-growing focus on online advertising and social media content. Marketers and brands are constantly trying to optimize existing ad campaigns and look for new ways to reach potential customers. Moreover, businesses and their agents/personnel are actively engaging in social media, attempting to elevate their public profile, drive consumer traffic, and influence the public's behavior and opinions. Gathering data associated with social media content and deriving insights therefrom is therefore of chief importance.
In response to this need, many systems and methods have been developed to gather, analyze, and transform the vast quantity of social media data that is available through the various social media platforms such that the data can be placed in a form useful to the entities responsible for authoring, buying, and placing social media content items. Among other things, entities placing content within social media platforms are interested in learning if the content is reaching its target demographic, whether that target demographic is interacting with the content, and whether the entities' online efforts are having an impact on consumer behavior. To this end, systems and methods have been developed to assess social media marketing efforts and convey information that can be used by marketers or brands to make decisions going forward.
These systems and methods, however, fail to deliver valuable insights with respect to how an individual's or entity's social media performance may compare to its peers, who is most effective at creating consumer interaction, and what entities most efficiently engage with the public over today's various social media platforms. The known systems and methods for assessing online marketing campaigns also lack adequate techniques for comparing one entity versus another, or one industry versus another. Nor do they account for the intra-organizational or intra-industry impact that one entity's social media activity may have on another entity. Rather, advancements in known systems and methods have primarily focused on expanding the quantity of data gathered and analyzed, identifying those social media users wielding the most influence among a demographic, and assessing a sentiment associated with discrete social media content items and/or users.
Accordingly, systems and methods could benefit from improved devices and techniques for analyzing social media data and transforming that data to facilitate a holistic assessment of an entity's social media activity. Moreover, improved device and techniques are needed to facilitate side-by-side comparisons of social media performance across a peer group, within an organization, across an industry, or across multiple industries.